Sapphire Dream (34 page)

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Authors: Pamela Montgomerie

BOOK: Sapphire Dream
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Hah. Bull’s-eye. Skirts and all.
“Drop your sword.”
Brenna jumped back out of the reach of the man she’d just attacked as a second man stepped out of one of the stalls—a big man with a bigger gun pointed right at Rourke’s heart.
Please God, not again.
There was no Hegarty to save him this time.
Rourke shoved his sword into his belt and raised his hands slowly. “We mean no harm.” His gaze flicked to the groaning man and then to her. “
I
mean ye no harm.”
“Thanks a lot,” she muttered. Her gaze returned to the man she’d injured. He
was
young, she realized as he raised his head to glare at her. He was lean and looked to be rather tall, though it was hard to tell about his height when he was bent double.
The wicked-looking knife at his waist caught her attention and she backed closer to Rourke. Her gaze swiveled to the man holding the gun. This one looked more like a line-backer for the Baltimore Ravens—broad face, mile-wide shoulders. Neither of the men were dressed like dandies, nor were they in rags. Just pants and shirts similar to the ones Rourke wore. On the linebacker’s head was a round, floppy hat with a sprig of some kind of wildflower pinned to it.
“Who are ye?” the big man demanded, his gun still pointed at Rourke’s middle.
“Rourke Douglas. Viscount Kinross.”
The man’s eyes widened. Slowly he dropped the muzzle of his gun.
“Are ye kin to Alexander?” Rourke asked.
The man nodded slowly. “Aye. I am his nephew.” He nodded toward the victim of Brenna’s attack. “Malcolm is his son.”
Rourke reached for Brenna and cupped her shoulder. “Ye may be wishing to apologize, Wildcat. Ye may have just ended your own family line.”
Brenna looked at him with confusion. “I
what
?”
“Ye’ve just unmanned your brother.”
Her pulse leaped as her wide-eyed gaze went from Rourke to the man and back again. “My . . . ?”
Rourke lifted his brows ruefully. “Brother.”
“Oops.”
“My . . . sister . . . is dead,” Malcolm grunted. He tried to straighten, then groaned and doubled over once more.
She looked at the downed man with shocked dismay.
Brother? I have a brother?
“Brenna?” The elder of the two Camerons took a step toward her, his gun hanging at his side. “Is it truly you, lass?”
Her scalp tingled as she met his searching gaze. “I’m Brenna Cameron.”
Suddenly a grin broke over his face. “Aye, and I should ha’ known.” He laughed, a deep hearty sound, and glanced at Rourke. “He calls ye Wildcat. An apt name, for you were always a wild wee thing.”
He took another step toward her. “You dinna remember me, lass, but I was a great favorite of yours once. Your cousin, Hamilton, I am. I’m ten years your senior and you tagged along after me like a duckling to her mam. I used to carry you on my shoulders when you got big enough to hold on. We were a pair, we were. I missed you heartily when you left.”
A wisp of a memory teased her mind. “I remember.” She was starting to shake. “Hamilton. I called you Ham and Eggs.”
The man chuckled. “Aye, you did, then you fell on the ground laughing at your own jest. Every time.” His eyes sobered, a sorrow entering them. “Where have you been, Brenna?”
The enormity of the answer nearly overwhelmed her.
I’ve been three hundred years in the future, driving a machine sixty miles an hour while listening to music played by a band that wasn’t there on my way home to watch people on the other side of the world from a small box in my cool living room during the heat of the summer. I returned home by flying over the Atlantic Ocean inside the belly of a great steel bird.
“I’ve been lost,” she told him. “I didn’t know how to get home.”
“But you’re here now. You’ve come home at last.”
Brenna nodded, needing to ask the question she most dreaded. “I’m looking for my father. Is he still alive?”
Malcolm growled.
Hamilton’s face lost all sign of humor. “I canna say, lass. He was taken two days past by the earl’s soldiers.”
The earl’s soldiers.
This couldn’t be happening. Two days. Twenty years she’d waited to see him again, and she’d missed him by
two days
?
“Why? Why did the earl take him?”
“He wanted you. His soldiers threatened to set fire to the house, then slaughter all who escaped unless he gave you up. But you werena here.”
She curled her arm around her middle, reeling from the words. “How many died?” Because of her. She hadn’t realized she’d swayed until Rourke grabbed her arm, righting her.
“Thankfully, none. Alex convinced them you were not here and agreed to go with them in your stead. They still torched the house, but not until all had escaped unharmed.”
Brenna heard the words as if from a distance, through a thick, blanketing mist of bloodred fury.
She jerked free of Rourke’s supporting hold. “
That goddamn son of a bitch.
”
Hamilton’s eyes widened.
“She is no lady,” Malcolm gasped behind her.
“They’re taking my father back to Stour. God knows what they’ll do to him. I’m going after him.” She whirled and pushed past Rourke and out of the stable into the muted sunshine.
“Brenna!” Hamilton yelled.
“Wildcat!”
Rourke and Hamilton caught up with her before she made it to the back corner of the house.
“Brenna, wait,” Hamilton said. “You dinna understand.”
Brenna slowed only fractionally. “The Earl of Slains wants me dead,” she spat. “He’s wanted me dead for twenty years, ever since some idiot seer told him I’d cause his destruction. He burned Rourke’s castle and killed his parents when they tried to protect me. Now he’s torched my family’s home and taken my father until you give me up to him. This isn’t going to end until one of us is dead.” She shot him a hard look. “How am I doing so far?”
“Aye, well, mayhap you do understand. But you canna simply go after him.”
She picked up her skirts and strode angrily toward the front of the house. “Watch me.”
Rourke grabbed her arm and stopped her. “Brenna, wait.”
She glared at him, then flicked her gaze to his crotch. “You’re risking your posterity.”
To his credit, he blanched only a little. “A battle such as this must be waged with care. I dinna deny your right to wage it, but—”
“Since when?”
He sighed. “I wouldna have ye rush in and get yourself killed.”
She was shaking, the hatred choking her. But he was right. As much as she wanted to go in, knee swinging, she couldn’t take on an entire castle single-handedly.
Her gaze went to her brother as he hobbled toward them, leading two horses. In the muted sunshine, his hair shone as auburn as her own. A brother.
Glimmers of memory curled through her mind. Little Malcolm leaning on the other side of their mother as she told them a bedtime story. His hand tucked into hers as they snuck out to the stables to watch the horses being saddled. His warm body tucked against hers in bed at night.
Brenna shook her thoughts out of the past and turned her gaze from Rourke to Hamilton and back again. “I agree we need a plan. But the Earl of Slains is
mine
.”
Malcolm scoffed as he joined them. “Yer naught but a lass. What can you do?”
She glanced meaningfully at his crotch. “If I’d wanted to kill you, you’d be dead, little brother.”
Malcolm scowled at her and stepped toward her as if he might strike her.
Rourke moved between them. “Wildcat, he’s your kin. You’ll show him the proper respect.”
Brenna clenched her jaw on the choking frustration. Malcolm was right. What
could
she do? If she could
will
the Earl of Slains dead, he’d be frying by now. But this wasn’t a battle of wills or brains. This battle required brute force and skillful wielding of a powerful weapon. And she sorely lacked both.
Then again, she might just know something that even the Earl of Slains didn’t know. Something that could give her the ultimate advantage.
“Maybe I can’t take on the earl. But I can help rescue my father.”
“Nay,” Malcolm spat. “You will remain with the women where you belong.”
“We will discuss this with the council,” Hamilton said.
But the younger man was not appeased. “I am acting chieftain of this clan in my father’s stead.
I
make the decisions.”
Hamilton clapped him on the shoulder. “Still, we must consult the council, aye, for of a certainty this affects us all.”
“We should turn her over to the earl and be done with it.” The look Malcolm shot her was laced with hatred.
Something inside her shriveled. What had she done?
“Malcolm.” She wasn’t certain what she would say to him. She only knew she had to say something.
But her brother only turned away. Twenty years she’d longed for this reunion, and she had already ruined the chance to reconnect with the first family member she came across.
 
 
“Fintrie Castle used to be the seat of the Camerons of Deveron,” Hamilton told them.
Rourke glanced at Brenna, who’d ridden silently beside him since leaving Deveron House, and then at Malcolm. The air was thick with sibling strife. But these two had no shared memories of better times to fall back on and Rourke worried at what the acting chieftain might do.
Malcolm had not physically hurt her. Rourke would never allow that. But her brother could make her life miserable in other ways. And Brenna, poor lass, was in sore need of a warm family welcome. Even if she had brought Malcolm’s ire upon herself.
In the distance, a town rose from the coastal plains. A small castle sat in the middle of the village as if naught but another house, looking as out of place as an eaglet in a sparrow’s nest.
“Deveron House was started near to a hundred years ago and took seventeen years to complete,” Hamilton continued. “The old laird who commissioned it ne’er saw his creation unfold, but the chieftain has lived there ever since. His younger brother took on at Fintrie and his line remains there still. We’ll all be living there now,” he added soberly.
Rourke wondered how long it would take Brenna to win over her kin, for he couldn’t leave until he felt certain she was safe. But once he was sure, he’d ride for Castle Stour.
After running from the prophecy for twenty years, he was suddenly itching for the fight to come. He was more than ready to face the man who even now threatened the woman he loved, the man who’d had his parents killed. The man who had wreaked havoc on the northeast coast with his greed and callous attitude toward those weaker than him, and caused so much destruction out of fear of a simple prophecy and a wee lass.
Either the earl or Brenna would die, of a certainty. He meant to make sure Brenna survived. It was the one good thing he could make of his wasted life.
“How much older am I than you?” Brenna asked Malcolm.
The young man merely grunted, but did not reply.
“Two years,” Hamilton said instead. “Do you remember him?”
“I’m starting to. A few things. He followed me around a lot.”
“Och, aye. He was always trying to keep up with you, but you were a wee terror, into mischief more oft than not. Malcolm became the terror when you left. Ye’d have been a pair, if the fates had not intervened.”
“Are there others?” Brenna asked Hamilton, her eyes brimming with curiosity. “Do I have any other brothers or sisters?”
“Nay, there’s just the two of you. Your mam had three before you and one more after Malcolm, but none of the lot lived to see their first year.”
Brenna’s brow creased. “The last one killed her.”
“Aye. And didna live long herself.”
The discussion came to a halt as they rode into the village. It was smaller than Monymusk, but well tended, with houses marching in neat rows along the cobbled streets. The hooves of their horses clattered along the cobbles as they rode toward the thick, turreted walls of Fintrie Castle.
Rourke moved his mount beside Hamilton’s. “ ’Twould be best not to reveal her identity. The earl will be waiting for word that she’s been seen.”
Hamilton met his gaze, his eyes wise as he nodded. “I was thinking the same.”
“She’s the Lady Marie, then.”
When they reached the thick, studded oak castle doors, they found several armed men waiting for them. Hamilton dismounted and Rourke followed suit, then lifted Brenna down. Malcolm still could not fully stand. Rourke winced in sympathy, wondering what additional pain the ride must have inflicted.
They followed Hamilton into a courtyard very different from the one at Picktillum. Whereas Picktillum had a virtual village within its walls, the village here was just outside. Within the walls was a full garden brimming with roses and other flowering plants his mother would have known the names of.

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